As part of their excellent Olympics coverage, Row2k have a fun Olympic Games pick ’em feature.
Here are my medal picks – a combination of hope, cautious optimism and random guesswork.
W1x 1. Czech Republic 2. Belarus 3. United States
M1x 1. New Zealand 2. Czech Republic 3. Great Britain
W2- 1. Canada 2. United States 3. New Zealand
M2- 1. South Africa 2. New Zealand 3. Croatia
W2x 1. China 2. Great Britain 3. New Zealand
M2x 1. Great Britain 2. Slovenia 3. Australia
M4- 1. Netherlands 2. Great Britain 3. New Zealand
LW2x 1. Australia 2. China 3. United States
LM2x 1. Great Britain 2. Denmark 3. France
LM4- 1. Great Britain 2. France 3. Australia
W4x 1. Great Britain 2. Russia 3. United States
M4x 1. Russia 2. France 3. United States
W8+ 1. United States 2. Romania 3. Canada
M8+ 1. United States 2. Canada 3. Great Britain
31 July 2008
More books
Following on from yesterday’s post, there is of course a variation on the game: Bookershame. Or, how many of the Booker Prize longlist have you read?
I’ve read none of this year’s and, looking back, have read a mere thirteen of all nominees:
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
Barbara Trapido, Frankie & Stankie
Yann Martel, Life of Pi
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
André Brink, Rumours of Rain
Molly Keane, Good Behaviour
J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun
Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
A. S. Byatt, Possession
David Malouf, Remembering Babylon
Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal
Bookershame indeed. As ever, if I count the books I own, it all looks rather more respectable …
While generally sceptical of prizes, it is pleasing to note the Booker’s enduring recognition of South African writing. Not just the usual Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, but also Dan Jacobson, André Brink, Christopher Hope, Justin Cartwright, Damon Galgut and Achmat Dangor. More, counting Doris Lessing, and Barbara Trapido’s nomination for the superb Frankie & Stankie.
I’ve read none of this year’s and, looking back, have read a mere thirteen of all nominees:
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
Barbara Trapido, Frankie & Stankie
Yann Martel, Life of Pi
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
André Brink, Rumours of Rain
Molly Keane, Good Behaviour
J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun
Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
A. S. Byatt, Possession
David Malouf, Remembering Babylon
Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal
Bookershame indeed. As ever, if I count the books I own, it all looks rather more respectable …
While generally sceptical of prizes, it is pleasing to note the Booker’s enduring recognition of South African writing. Not just the usual Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, but also Dan Jacobson, André Brink, Christopher Hope, Justin Cartwright, Damon Galgut and Achmat Dangor. More, counting Doris Lessing, and Barbara Trapido’s nomination for the superb Frankie & Stankie.
30 July 2008
Bookshame
An article in the Telegraph on a literary game - the books that you haven't read.
Not an entirely new idea, as there was a rash of articles on the topic when Pierre Bayard's somewhat ironical book How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read was published, but the idea was clearly reignited at the Ways With Words festival in Dartington.
The Telegraph calls it Humiliation. I prefer Bookshame, and know the game well.
Despite having an English degree from a reasonably respectable university, I have what Sylvia Plath termed, on her arrival in Cambridge, 'whistling gaps' in my knowledge. No Proust, no more than a few pages of Stendhal; no Vanity Fair, no Pride and Prejudice. I once read somewhere that women didn't read Walden. So, powered by the nuclear fission of Dead Poets Society and sophomoric feminism, I bought a second-hand copy. Which, eleven years later, I'm still to read.
But then, I was encouraged to question the canon, to be suspicious of the fact that the books that lie shamefully unread are largely by dead white guys or spinsters in poke bonnets. So I may or may not read Our Mutual Friend (even if I told my tutor I had, and managed a convincing dissection of its central theme. English degrees are good for learning how to do this), but it doesn't matter either way. Sometimes, they're only books.
Not an entirely new idea, as there was a rash of articles on the topic when Pierre Bayard's somewhat ironical book How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read was published, but the idea was clearly reignited at the Ways With Words festival in Dartington.
The Telegraph calls it Humiliation. I prefer Bookshame, and know the game well.
Despite having an English degree from a reasonably respectable university, I have what Sylvia Plath termed, on her arrival in Cambridge, 'whistling gaps' in my knowledge. No Proust, no more than a few pages of Stendhal; no Vanity Fair, no Pride and Prejudice. I once read somewhere that women didn't read Walden. So, powered by the nuclear fission of Dead Poets Society and sophomoric feminism, I bought a second-hand copy. Which, eleven years later, I'm still to read.
But then, I was encouraged to question the canon, to be suspicious of the fact that the books that lie shamefully unread are largely by dead white guys or spinsters in poke bonnets. So I may or may not read Our Mutual Friend (even if I told my tutor I had, and managed a convincing dissection of its central theme. English degrees are good for learning how to do this), but it doesn't matter either way. Sometimes, they're only books.
Labels:
books,
bookshame,
reading,
Sylvia Plath,
Ways With Words
28 July 2008
Summer sculling
Out on a gorgeous summer evening: the warm golden light that makes trailing to the river after work worth the effort.
The trailer was back from Nat Champs and a few people were unloading, looking more relaxed than they have in a long while. Rest earned for the work is done.
I headed out on my own, a general plan for the outing but nothing too adventurous. A quiet purpose but also sculling to remember that I love it.
The river was almost empty, just a few other scullers with the same idea in mind. No crews steaming along, urged by coach and cox. Instead, a quietness, a solitary enjoyment.
I paddled in, put my boat away, left for home. Dark pinkish grey clouds and the sun like the burst yolk of a free-range egg. Slipping below the horizon, reminding me that these days are few and precious. The panting dog-days of August are to come, then the sharpening promise of autumn. Home after dark.
The trailer was back from Nat Champs and a few people were unloading, looking more relaxed than they have in a long while. Rest earned for the work is done.
I headed out on my own, a general plan for the outing but nothing too adventurous. A quiet purpose but also sculling to remember that I love it.
The river was almost empty, just a few other scullers with the same idea in mind. No crews steaming along, urged by coach and cox. Instead, a quietness, a solitary enjoyment.
I paddled in, put my boat away, left for home. Dark pinkish grey clouds and the sun like the burst yolk of a free-range egg. Slipping below the horizon, reminding me that these days are few and precious. The panting dog-days of August are to come, then the sharpening promise of autumn. Home after dark.
22 July 2008
Irony
I am aware of the irony that this blog is, so far, mostly not about rowing. Imitating life, to some extent, but something will be done.
20 July 2008
Race for your life, Charlie Brown
A while ago I took part in Race for Life, in aid of Cancer Research UK.
It was something of an adventure - a part of town I hadn't been to before, not being sure of how I was running owing to a lack of training runs.
In the event, I was very pleased to exceed my expectations, finishing roughly two minutes faster than I'd hoped. So all the training is paying off somewhere.
The best thing, though, was the atmosphere. Literally thousands of women of all ages and levels of fitness, in stetson and tutus and angel wings and pink, pink, pink, like some mildly athletic hen night. In addition to our race numbers pinned to our fronts, many had sheets on their backs, which told of who they were running for, family and friends who had suffered cancer.
I felt very glad that I had no one to put on my back.
It was something of an adventure - a part of town I hadn't been to before, not being sure of how I was running owing to a lack of training runs.
In the event, I was very pleased to exceed my expectations, finishing roughly two minutes faster than I'd hoped. So all the training is paying off somewhere.
The best thing, though, was the atmosphere. Literally thousands of women of all ages and levels of fitness, in stetson and tutus and angel wings and pink, pink, pink, like some mildly athletic hen night. In addition to our race numbers pinned to our fronts, many had sheets on their backs, which told of who they were running for, family and friends who had suffered cancer.
I felt very glad that I had no one to put on my back.
17 July 2008
Wise words
The world is a terrible place, full of depression, misery and
loneliness. But it's the only one we have. So if you have still
got time left, go for an audition, get to formal hall, ask her
out, get out of bed, just try it.
You'll never get a chance like this again.
16 July 2008
Listmania, or Firing the Western Can[n]on
I like lists. It’s something about their order, the accumulation of what has been or the promise of what is to come.
Once, when I was about fifteen, I spent a number of days compiling a list of books I wanted to read. It runs to several pages of tiny handwriting in a square-papered French exercise book. I uncovered it recently and flicked through, expecting to confidently cross off, or rather put a neat tick (for that was the method I had chosen) next to most of the books.
Not so. I managed one or two, here and there. Recently another – Postcards from the Edge – but the mass remains unread.
Lists of books are tricky, subjective things. The perennial lists of what is ‘good’ – best books, top books, favourite books – almost seem confined to the same library, a combination of GCSE and A-level set texts (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre), other books which are perceived to be ‘good’, a smattering of reasonably modern works then, of course, The Lord of the Rings and, latterly, the septiform Harry Potter beast. Nothing too experimental or self-consciously difficult, and most of them read before we reach majority: my reasonable acquaintance with the Western Canon is entirely down to my approximation of a modern classical education by some enlightened teachers.
Yet I always count how many of them I have read, expecting a respectable number, but generally managing less than half. For example, of the BBC’s 2003 ‘Top 100 books’, I have managed thirty. Of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die, less than a hundred. (Though am pleased, if a little surprised, to note the prominence of South African writing on that list).
Of course, I have tried to be scrupulously honest, to tick off only books that I have read all the way through, in its original form. I don’t think my Black Beauty picture book counts. But if I count, along with the books that I have read, the books I feel I have read, the number looks infinitely better (especially if you also count the books I own). Like Clive James, I never quite got round to reading Middlemarch, though I did manage an essay of passably scholarliness for a first-year undergraduate, and there are many others. I’ve at least heard of most of them, even if they inhabit some dim literary hinterland where it’s a little too dark to tell if it’s Flann O’Brien or Flannery O’Connor.
But are lists good things anyway? Limited at best, prescriptive at worst, I prefer my free-range habits, my reading ratio of one ‘proper’ book to be savoured and considered to one ‘junk food’ to be gulped down and galloped through. Books lead on to each other, an organic process rather than moving down a list: I read Gillian Slovo’s Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, then immediately ordered 117 Days by Ruth First from amazon, something I had meant to do ages ago, when I read The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs.
I suspect it’s the lists that I like, not the instructions they contain.
Once, when I was about fifteen, I spent a number of days compiling a list of books I wanted to read. It runs to several pages of tiny handwriting in a square-papered French exercise book. I uncovered it recently and flicked through, expecting to confidently cross off, or rather put a neat tick (for that was the method I had chosen) next to most of the books.
Not so. I managed one or two, here and there. Recently another – Postcards from the Edge – but the mass remains unread.
Lists of books are tricky, subjective things. The perennial lists of what is ‘good’ – best books, top books, favourite books – almost seem confined to the same library, a combination of GCSE and A-level set texts (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre), other books which are perceived to be ‘good’, a smattering of reasonably modern works then, of course, The Lord of the Rings and, latterly, the septiform Harry Potter beast. Nothing too experimental or self-consciously difficult, and most of them read before we reach majority: my reasonable acquaintance with the Western Canon is entirely down to my approximation of a modern classical education by some enlightened teachers.
Yet I always count how many of them I have read, expecting a respectable number, but generally managing less than half. For example, of the BBC’s 2003 ‘Top 100 books’, I have managed thirty. Of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die, less than a hundred. (Though am pleased, if a little surprised, to note the prominence of South African writing on that list).
Of course, I have tried to be scrupulously honest, to tick off only books that I have read all the way through, in its original form. I don’t think my Black Beauty picture book counts. But if I count, along with the books that I have read, the books I feel I have read, the number looks infinitely better (especially if you also count the books I own). Like Clive James, I never quite got round to reading Middlemarch, though I did manage an essay of passably scholarliness for a first-year undergraduate, and there are many others. I’ve at least heard of most of them, even if they inhabit some dim literary hinterland where it’s a little too dark to tell if it’s Flann O’Brien or Flannery O’Connor.
But are lists good things anyway? Limited at best, prescriptive at worst, I prefer my free-range habits, my reading ratio of one ‘proper’ book to be savoured and considered to one ‘junk food’ to be gulped down and galloped through. Books lead on to each other, an organic process rather than moving down a list: I read Gillian Slovo’s Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, then immediately ordered 117 Days by Ruth First from amazon, something I had meant to do ages ago, when I read The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs.
I suspect it’s the lists that I like, not the instructions they contain.
15 July 2008
But why?
Here we are in cyberspace. Again. I've decided to stop beating about the bush and acknowledge that I want to write about rowing. Amongst other things.
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